Replacement hardware

The three ports of the
EdgeRouter Lite
are not enough,
since one will go to the AP, one to uplink, and one to the wired network.
I’d rather have a couple of extra ports where my Internet
comes in without having to have a separate switch there.

The web UI is fine. It’s actually better than fine. It’s the best web
UI I’ve seen on a router, be it the “why do you even have this” web UI
that (even high end) Cisco routers have, or normal home broadband
routers.

But like with Cisco if you really want to configure you need to do it
command line. The web UI falls short when you get to slightly more
complicated things like pppoe.

The router runs EdgeOS, which is based on Vyatta, which in turn looks
like the Juniper CLI except not as polished (e.g. no show | display
set).

It also seems you have to run both commit and save after changing
the config, since the former doesn’t actually persist the new config
to disk.

One annoyance with this router is that while you can do L2 switching
between some ports, you can’t provide tagged output on one port and
the same VLAN untagged on another. It’s a router with some switching
capabilities, but it’s not a switch.

I wanted to make sure the range was good enough, so I got the Long
Range one.

You configure it using the UniFi controller, a piece of software
written in Java that you run on a PC of some sort. It starts up a web
server which you connect to. It’s pretty neat. It’s obvious that this
would work great to manage many APs. You don’t even need to run the
controller locally, you could run it in a VM in some cloud service
like EC2 or GCE.

The only complaint I have about the controller is that it requires
3.5GB disk space for its backing MongoDB database.

The management interface of the AP comes untagged, and the SSIDs are
delivered either on that same segment or optionally with a VLAN tag.
Obviously I kept them separate.

Since the AP management is not on a switched network I had to specify
the address of the UniFi controller. I found it most convenient to do
that via DHCP: